Application programs, such as the visual development tools produced by Microsoft Corporation, Visual C++, Visual Basic, and Visual J++ provide a graphical user interface to assist in the development of programs in various object oriented programming languages. Other vendors such as Symantec corporation provide applications for similar development assistance. These programming solutions allow for editing and adding source code in a text editor along with creating a graphic representation of the source code. The text editor in these development tools is independent of the graphic representation. The development tool does not immediately reflect the changes in the graphic representation when new code is added, an intermediary step must occur, such as, compilation of the code, or reparsing of the entire source code to rebuild the graphic representation.
Additionally, in these development tools, source code may be generated by the development tool, providing structural code, which must be added to by a user to furnish usable code. The development tool kits create user interface code and skeletal code to which a user must add, so that the interface code, once compiled, may perform some function desired by the user. For example, in Visual C++ a user may wish to create a dialog box with a button to start a user created program and a button to stop the program. The user can choose to create a dialog box with a button representing start and a button representing stop which the development tool will generate. However, Visual C++ will not assist in generating code for the user created program. A user must develop the functions and classes for implementing this software without assistance from the development tool.
For additional information on graphical representation of code and code generators please see, Adaptive Object-Oriented Software The Demeter Method with propagation patterns by Karl J. Lieberherr, PWS Publishing Company 1996. ISBN 0-534-94602-X, Object Oriented Modeling and Design by James Rumbaugh et al., Prentice Hall 1991. ISBN 0-13-629841-9, Taming C++ Pattern Classes and Persistence for Large Projects by Jiri Soukup, Addison Wesley PublishingCompany 1994. ISBN 0-201-52826-6, The GenVoca Model of Software-System Generators, by Don Batory, Vivek Singhal, Jeff Thomas, Sankar Dasari, Bart Geraci, and Marty Sirkin, IEEE Software, September 1994, A Software System Generator for DataStructures, Ph.D. Dissertation by Martin J. Sirkin Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, March 1994, Scalable Software Libraries, Don Batory, Vivek Singhal, Jeff Thomas, and Marty Sirkin, Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT '93 Conference (Los Angeles), December 1993. All of which are incorporporated herein by reference in their entirety.